


and you with all your vibrant youth

by Rupzydaisy



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Found Family, Gen, Immortality, Mortality, Post Film, mentions of Nicky and Joe, mentions of Quynh - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-01
Updated: 2020-08-01
Packaged: 2021-03-06 04:02:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25647010
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rupzydaisy/pseuds/Rupzydaisy
Summary: Andy gets phantom pains.She felt it first in the Goussainville safe house, sunk deeper into her weariness than the sofa cushion underneath her. She had held her hand up, feeling a prickling over her skin that emanated from something that had long since passed.Not as shallow as a tingle, and deeper than pins and needles, it was like there was a blow vibrating back over her bones; a lost echo catching up to her after all her centuries of fighting.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache & Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Nile Freeman
Comments: 10
Kudos: 104





	and you with all your vibrant youth

**Author's Note:**

> this film has eaten my brain, and so i'm here...again

Andy gets phantom pains. 

She felt it first in the Goussainville safe house, sunk deeper into her weariness than the sofa cushion underneath her. She had held her hand up, feeling a prickling over her skin that emanated from  _ something _ that had long since passed. 

Not as shallow as a tingle, and deeper than pins and needles, it was like there was a blow vibrating back over her bones; a lost echo catching up to her after all her centuries of fighting. 

She had seen it before in others, in soldiers who had lost limbs and how they would swear up and down in ditches and on hospital gurneys that they still had their leg or their arm,  _ it was right there, I can feel it, look I can move it.  _ It would linger even after the delirium or the pain which had driven them to the brink of unconsciousness ebbed away. 

As modern medicine replaced miracles, she came to understand its nerves signalling, like a firefly blinking in darkness to a pattern only it knows. After millennia of battles, it made sense that her now mortal body would struggle to condense those years into something more manageable to carry. 

Andy knew she was an invisible patchwork scars. It had absorbed wounds, spat out bullets and stitched itself together until it was smooth and unblemished, but if it hadn’t, there would not be a single part of her that remained unscathed. Fire, water, steel...all of it had left its mark on her at some point. 

And now she felt haunted inside her own skin. 

It makes her wonder if Lykon had felt it, or if because her years vastly outmatched his, it was just a side effect for her extended life on earth. He had fallen without warning, one moment he had swung his sword, catching another warrior in the chest, and in the next he staggered, with the sudden realisation his immortality had gone. 

It had stunned them. For years, her and Quynh had skirted around battles and avoided human contact for fear of suffering the same fate. They had twisted the whole memory of that day, week, the entire year, trying to find the trigger that caused the change, and came up with nothing. 

His immortality left as indecipherably as it had arrived. 

She was still looking for the reason behind hers. 

* * *

Andy finds herself training harder, although she can't bring herself to adapt her fighting style in a way that could compensate for her mortality. She careens through the group in their training sessions and is pleased when they don't pull their punches as they attack.

She leaves with blooming bruises under her newly gifted armour that Copley had sent on. It had been accompanied by meaningful looks and quips from the rest of her family. They meant well, she knew that, but still left a faint bitter taste in her mouth as she straps on the chest plate, bracers, and greaves. 

After all, there had been centuries when she had torn through armies with her bare hands. 

One evening, long after the dining table had been cleared and everyone headed to their beds, Andy walks through to the kitchen sink and catches sight of Nile training in the room. Lost in the movement, the young woman punches through with each sit up, until finally her eyes slide across the room. 

"Don't mind me, just grabbing some water." 

Andy watches out of the corner of her eye as she nods back, halfway through her sit up and rolls out the trapped tension in her shoulders. The focussed look in Nile’s eyes tampers back to a small smile, and from the way she sits up slowly, Andy sees there's something that's been on her mind for a long time that she hadn't managed to work out yet. 

"Penny for your thoughts." Then Andy frowns, "Or maybe it'll be drachma from the back of the sofa." 

"I couldn't sleep." Nile's smile turns sheepish as she drops her head, hiding her eyes. "I was thinking something...and I can't get it out of my head."

"What is it?" Andy asks with a rare grin slicing across her cheeks, recalling the conversation at the dinner table about their most embarrassing deaths, because it's probably not easy to shake off the imagery of dysentery in the desert. “You look for my top ten comical deaths?” 

But Nile then looks up, doesn't laugh, and instead asks, "You losing your immortality. Is it really because of me?"

The look of guilt in her face is raw and heavy, even in the half-light filtering through the curtainless window, and Andy has to take her time in setting down the empty glass on the counter. 

It's the kind of guilt she recognises in Booker, and yet it's different to the look in his eyes once they had found him. With him, expectations had been unaligned from the start as three became four,  _ again _ . He had struggled to shake off the feeling that he was a poor replacement and now that Andy looks back, she knows she hadn't been honest enough in her grief to correct him as she should have done. Perhaps, if she had suffered the wound, pushed at the bruise and spoken more truthfully, he may have understood more at the time and acted differently when it came to losing love, or even learnt from her mistakes better. 

It also makes her wonder what sparked Nile's need to ask now. 

But with a slow and steady exhale, she replies as honestly as she can. "I don't know."

"Your friend, Lykon, when he died...was there any warning for that?"

"No." The word clips short in her mouth as she remembers holding her hand against his side, feeling her fingers slick with his blood. That was something that had been frequenting her dreams more often; a memory, a reminder, a warning. 

"Nothing had changed, until it did. We didn't know we could die." 

"Oh."

Andy pushes off from where she's leaning against the counter and comes to sit on the floor beside Nile. Staring at the wall opposite, her fingers twist around each other. The blanket of darkness around them makes it easier to talk about these secrets that she had guarded, even from herself. "We didn't know we could die. We didn't think there were any rules.  _ I _ didn't think there were any rules. Not for a long, long time." 

She feels a bruise deeper than any physical mark ache, and despite the eternity in between  _ then _ and  _ now,  _ she still has to catch her breath from the loss. When you spend lifetimes with someone, grief is harder to shake off. 

"Before Quynh I was alone, until I dreamt of her. With the two of us, it seemed less like a fluke. We were bound together by it, in so many ways. Then we dreamt Lykon. I am the oldest, and yet, somehow he died first. We spent years trying to reason it out...but even then…"

"I guess it’s like asking why Joe and Nicky become immortal at the same time."

Andy smirks, "You've heard them, they have their explanations."

"Destiny." Nile nods back. 

It's an easy answer to supply, even after such a short time in the couple's' presence. She had even borrowed it for a while, placed it with care between the treasured moments she had shared with Quynh when they were still together. 

But it wasn't something the long march of time would allow her to keep. 

It claimed her mother's face, the sound of her sisters' laughter, and was slowly taking her memories of Quynh no matter how hard she gripped onto them. 

"Call it what you want."

Nile looks back at her, "You don't?"

"Maybe I've lived too long. God, fate, destiny, fairness. It means nothing substantial when you've walked the whole world over so many times and seen the same shit happen more than once." The old retort flies off her lips, well-worn and Andy can hear the hardness around her teeth. 

She sighs, breathes past the ache. "But what do I know? None of it makes sense. Just because I’ve lived too long and haven’t found out the reason, doesn’t mean that there isn’t one."

"Do you think that? Really?" 

The scepticism in her voice makes Andy smile again, because here she is, age worn and battle hardened, and yet there's no shaking the idea that had crept into Andy’s head after their fight at the lab. "I thought I had forgotten how to, but now, I'm not so sure. And I can live like that, Nile."

* * *

Rest comes easier to her now. Her body craves sleep or just the time to sit and relax, to heal slowly, cell by cell by cell. 

It feels painstakingly slow. 

Funny, how having all the time in the world only made her impatient at the end of it. 

The extra quiet time in between their latest missions makes Andy remember the old days; Andromache, Andrea, Andrews, Andy, a kaleidoscope of names with one face, a marble statue caught inside a forever rotating time glass as the sand replenished under her feet no matter which way she turned. 

Andy finds herself using the time to reminisce more often. She digs back through her memories, through the murky waters of lived history. The pain in her body is of no comparison to the pain of her past, not with centuries of overlaid paths criss crossed over a world that continued to die back and bloom and die again, and be trodden into the dirt to nourish the future. 

Time once was, that the world turned around her as she walked on and on. She had spent a fraction of her years as a shadow way back at the start, barely human even with the weight of her axe on her back. With her feet on  _ her  _ land, she stood on the steppe and listened to the wind blow across the seemingly endless landscape, thinking that the world was too small, and then it became too large.

And she knows she'd like to return there again and see it at least one more time. 

When she closes her eyes to rest, but not dream, she can picture Quynh, and despite her fading memories there were still well-worn paths back to her that she could take. 

Andy closes her eyes and recalls the smell of rain on the plains, hears the rustle of thigh high grass shift, and then bend under her horse's hooves as she flies across land, leagues falling behind her. And when she turns, Quynh is there, hunched over her horse's mane and determined to race ahead. As she zips past, with a wicked smile across her face, it makes Andy’s heart soar. 

She lets the memory fade and tracks it back to one that she's clung to in all its bitter sweetness. Her boots crest a sand dune, then she's tumbling and sliding down to the bottom. Quynh is there, almost passed out from dehydration, but  _ there _ . When Andy's footsteps quicken, she sinks deeper into the sand in her haste, but it doesn’t matter

Because Quynh's sunburned hands are reaching for her shoulders and face, Andy feels like the drought in her soul has been quenched. 

* * *

She leads her army, her family of immortals, from one fight to the next. They go where they are needed. They go where no one else would dream of walking out alive, and they continue to be the exception. 

Andy leads the charge, and Joe, Nicky, and Nile follow, orientating around her to cover her back. They move consciously and unconsciously trying to figure out how they can fit together in this new formation, immortal and mortal, new and old. It’s like learning a new language, and like anything else it doesn’t happen smoothly or without mistakes. 

In Odessa, Nicky’s torso is peppered with bullets as he lunges forward to shield Andy from the swing of a machine gun. They hobble out of Cairo after Joe covers a grenade that blows off a whole leg, and Nile faces off against a whole contingent of private bodyguards in Belize when a panic room door shuts and cuts her off from the rest. 

But they get better at it. 

In a world that poses a greater threat to them, and where the risk of being caught is higher than ever, the kid is unflinchingly optimistic. Nile is good for them, just as much as they try to be good for her. She sees it in the way Joe and Nicky are energised by it too, like a prism, the light is caught within their team and refracted around. 

Even in her mortality, Andy feels it; remarkable. 

And there is no way to change who she is; a warrior. To battle was in her blood, long before she had found that she could fall and then rise up again. 

Andromache, of Scythia, of the Old Guard, would always,  _ always _ fight. 

She didn’t fear death. She couldn’t fear it when it was so familiar to her. It didn't matter that her next battle may be her last. She had found her belief again, tucked it behind her ribs to keep it close and safe, and was determined to lose it. If she fell, then she fell, and it would be with her axe or a gun or a sword in hand trying to do some good. 

Even in her mortality there is no  _ after _ or  _ before.  _

She had her purpose; nothing had changed. 

* * *

Andy flies ahead alone on the excuse of extra reconnaissance and it gives her a full week at the Mombasa safe house before the others get there. But by the time evening rolls around, the quiet gets to her and she drags a chair out to the small balcony and looks out at the ocean with her burner phone gripped in her hand. From the balcony, Andy watches the sea laps against the shoreline. Then she slots in the new sim card and switches on the mobile. 

It rings out four times on separate numbers, and she dials the fifth, fully prepared to dial right through the full list of numbers if it came to it. But the line clicks, and the call is picked up. It turns out he's in the Istanbul apartment, which makes sense because he had set it up himself. 

He doesn't speak, and she wonders if he's holding his breath.

"Come on, Book. I could do with some company."

"Andy?" There's a ragged breath down the line and she can hear the scrape of glass on a table. "Why are you calling?"

"Honestly…. it’s too quiet here." 

He falls quiet again, right up to the point where she thinks he's hung up. "Book-"

"What can I say, it's Istanbul. Complete opposite. Easy to get lost in the noise, in the crowds. Andy, why are you calling? I'm-"

"I know, I know." She cuts him off, because edging around the word,  _ exile, _ the punishment they had doled out, was the best she could do. 

The permeance of it didn't matter to the rest of the team, save for her. Joe and Nicky would wait it out, and Nile would go along with it, in her own way. Or maybe she would wear them down, the first few decades seeming to drag as time lengths out before her. Even by half a century, their bruised feelings would be dust long gone in the rear-view mirror. 

In the end, they were family. Booker would regain their trust and return to the fold. 

She just didn't have the luxury of that time. 

Andy shakes the thought from her mind, and instead quips, "You should brush up on your Finnish. Or learn capoeira."

"What?" 

"Nile was trained in the marines. She was taught how to fight with others, but even then, it's going to be different with us. She's learning now, and you'll have to do the same. Don't bother coming back if you're going to be sloppy."

There's a bark of laughter down the phone and she hears the chink of glass tapping against teeth, and thinks  _ beer bottle _ . 

"Wouldn't dream of it, boss." He chuckles again. "You said she had potential. Has she had a go with any of the antiques?"

"Joe's started off with some of the basics, she’s got a knack with a bow too. And she found the bayonet you left behind in Rasquera." 

"I thought I had lost that."

"Nah, it's still there. Still in one piece."

Something falls into place, and the conversation begins to flow easier, or maybe his bottle is filled with something stronger and it loosens his tongue quicker. They talk about ordinary things; a football match he had caught on the TV, her flight over inside a cargo crate, how they had eaten at least three pounds of baklava on a fishing boat they had caught from Cyprus when trying to dodge stricter border patrols. 

They keep talking as the sun is swallowed by the sea, and Booker eventually asks her, "What is it like? Being mortal."

"Honestly? It's unnerving." She bites back a laugh. "Sometimes...I think I can feel it." 

She swallows, feeling the heavy weight in her chest and the prickle of tears behind her eyes. "We make mistakes, that comes from living so long. And we're not infallible. I have...regrets. I have things I wish I had done differently, but we use the time we have as best we can.” 

“Shit job, huh?” 

“Come on, Book.” She snorts, knowing that he’s been turning it over in his head too. It’s hard to change bad habits, whether you’ve been stuck with them for years or for decades. “Things change, even when we're not looking. With this, I’ve just gotten a heads up to what was already coming. It means I can see things from a new angle now, with Nile, with the work we've been doing."

Booker lets out a shaky exhale, and she feels his hesitation to agree. So instead of dragging a half-hearted response out of him, she falls back into a companionable silence they'd always been able to share. 

But then she can’t help herself, tacking on her final thoughts on the matter, wanting to imprint them firmly into his memories when she’d be long gone. 

"We keep moving. We make the choice to keep  _ trying _ , Book. And it balances out eventually. Trust me and give yourself time."


End file.
